Hello Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative Members,
 
As 2020 comes to a close, we thought we would take some time to reflect upon all that we were able to accomplish together this year under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. We hope that you will have opportunities to relax and recharge in these final weeks of the year, and the space to recognize the many ways in which you and your organizations made a difference.

Here are some of the Collaborative’s 2020 highlights:

• Our community has grown even more this year, and we are excited that we now count more than 5,100 of you as part of our Collaborative network; not only in Illinois, but as far-reaching as Australia and New Zealand.
• For the second year in a row, the State of Illinois recognized Trauma-Informed Awareness Day on May 15^th. The first Trauma-Informed Awareness Day was informed, in part, by our report on the 2013 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data.

• We launched a brand new Advisory Council, with leaders from healthcare, justice, education, social services, and more. Find out more about our Advisory Council here. 
• We launched a Trauma-Informed Statewide Working Group dedicated to creating a plan of action for the State of Illinois to become a trauma-informed state with leaders in from healthcare, justice, education, social services, as well as community members from across Illinois. See our opening presentation here. 

• We embarked on a year-long project with partners at ICOY and Chicago Growth Mindset to provide trauma-informed organizational transformation to Ingenuity Inc. Ingenuity, and its more than 600 member organizations, provides after-school arts education to Chicago Public Schools students across the city. 
• We welcomed two new cohorts of ACE Interface trainers in McHenry County and Skokie, adding more than sixty new presenters to our roster. These cohorts are part of the Trauma-Informed McHenry County Initiative and Resilient Skokie Community Collaborative, respectively, and have already reached hundreds of community members with the ACE Interface curriculum.
• We released reports and tools, including an Environmental Scan of our Trauma-Informed Hospital Working Group and a Policy Scan of trauma-informed state-legislation across the country.
• Our trainings on ACEs, trauma, resilience, and trauma-informed care have reached over 1800 people from community-based organizations, FQHCs, schools, the justice and corrections sector, and more. We also provided trainings as part of a system-wide initiative to staff at Cook County Health and Hospitals, which will continue into 2021.
• We released two new trainings covering historical and structural trauma and provider burnout-- topics that have become even more resonant and vital in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the racial justice protests and movement.

• Our work with the Trauma-Informed Hospital Collaborative continued to bring trauma-informed transformation to health care systems and communities across the state--with 19 hospitals and health systems dedicated to this work.
• In the wake of the racial justice protests following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we stood firm in our commitment to racial equity in trauma-informed transformation: Supporting the movement for police-free schools in Chicago, and hosting a webinar on the role of healthcare providers in police-free education.

• We also hosted an additional 6 webinars, reaching almost 1,200 people. If you missed any, check them out here.